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Paul Harris: Portrait of Our President

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The Observer’s ten-year US correspondent Paul Harris recently wrote a thoughtful article entitled “From hope to fear: the broken promises of Barack Obama.” Here is his summation:

Over the last two weeks, the world has seen an extraordinary series of revelations about the scale, size and activities of the National Security Agency under Obama’s administration. Though he came to power decrying the secret actions of Bush, Obama has embraced and extended many of the same activities. His NSA uses a secret court system to get permission for its shadowy work, hauls out “metadata” on millions’ of Americans’ phone calls, taps into the biggest and most powerful internet companies of the Information Age – Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Yahoo, Google – to monitor and snoop. Its tools have names like Prism and Boundless Informant, as if their inventors were all too aware that they resembled dystopian science fiction.

Yet Obama has flippantly dismissed the controversy. Resorting to the worst tactics of the Bush years, his message is: “Trust us. We’re the good guys.” And then Congress is briefed – in secret, of course – about the “dozens” of terrorist plots such industrial-scale espionage has stopped.

No one in that hall in Boston in 2004 [for Obama’s keynote address for John Kerry for Prez at Dem Nat. Convention] could have imagined that the young, eloquent and inspiring politician would have transformed so dramatically less than a decade later. Yet the Age of Obama is not one of hope and change; it is the era of the National Security President. Obama has overseen increasing use of drones, in a targeted killing programme across the globe. No doubt they wipe out legitimate targets. But the drones also murder American citizens – such as Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulraman in 2011 – with no trial amid a legal framework that – again – is kept largely secret. They wipe out wedding parties by accident. Any “military-aged male” in a drone strike zone is called a legitimate target, turning the innocent into the guilty to justify death from above. Then there is Guantánamo Bay, that bleeding sore on the face of American civil liberties. It is a tropical gulag of 166 men – more than half cleared for release but still kept behind bars – who are starving themselves out of desperation. Obama promised to close it down in 2008. He failed. He promised again last month. But nothing has happened. Meanwhile, the regime inside the camp is growing more savage.

Obama has cracked down aggressively on whistleblowers, using the Espionage Act – a hangover from the first world war – more times than all his predecessors combined. He has presided over an explosion of over-classification, as millions of government documents are shuttered away from public eyes. His Department of Justice has collected the phone records of AP journalists and accessed the emails of a Fox News reporter.

It’s the stuff of conspiracy theorist fantasies. But these abuses of power are real and are playing out the front pages of America’s papers every day. When the IRS searched for conservative groups to target for special treatment, it confirmed the worst fears of every rightwinger in America.

How on earth did we get here from Boston, 2004? Bush – a cipher of a politician whose only belief was in his right to rule – surrounded himself with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton and an army of whispering neocons. Obama does not have that excuse. When his staff meets to mull over the latest names in their killing programme – an event dubbed “Terror Tuesdays” – Obama himself is often present.

Neither is Obama ignorant of the law; he’s a constitutional law professor. In turning America into a national security state, the awful truth is that he knows full well what he is doing.

There are three more years of this to come. Involvement in Syria’s war looms, and more terrorist attacks like the one that hit the Boston marathon could lurk in the future. Where will Obama take America in that time? Judging him on his past actions, I think it will be no place good.

Due to his race, Obama is often cast in the light of America’s civil rights movement and its heroic leader, Martin Luther King. Among King’s most famous words are his hopes that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”.

That dream of King’s was what many believed Obama would one day fulfill. Perhaps he has, just not in the way anyone thought. In 2013 – amid drones, assassinations, mass spying, secret courts and tapping journalists’ phones – it seems that Obama’s race matters less and less, while his inner character is shining through for judgment. It is sorely wanting.

Comments

The jig was up back in July 2008 when candidate Obama reneged on his pledge to filibuster the FISA Amendments Act (granting immunity to the telecoms involved in Bush's illegal spying programs) and instead used his position as presumptive Presidential nominee to whip for its passage.

You could look further back I suppose to February 2, 2006 when Obama voted for the Patriot Act Extension in a 95-1 vote .

Of course, that was an indictment not just of Obama but the Democrats in general. Every Democratic Senator voted for it except Feingold who voted no and Bingaman (D-NM) who was absent.

For me, it was Obama's actions on the FISA Amendments Act that was the final straw for me. I knew from the beginning he was not a progressive but this was the last in a series of actions I found objectionable and turned me from a tepid supporter into an ongoing opponent.

The people at the Black Agenda Report can take Obama's anti-progressive me-firstism back even further, but whether we start the clock five years, seven years or more ago, it has been obvious that the only promise that Obama intended to keep was to fight against progressivism in all its forms.

Here's the link to the video roundtable, since you write on this topic quite extensively.

Heard Susan Page's interview on "The Press Pool" with Julie Mason (a couple days back). Haven't been able to listen to it yet, but Page was really quite "blown away" by these three gentlemen with over 90 years collective experience.

Bottom Line: What Snowden revealed--NOT EVEN "THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG."

If the accepted response to legitimate, increased, constant assassination threats becomes the right to go all Nixon on America's civil rights, then of course the only sane alternative is to elect white men so rich they can afford their own security apparatus, and not waste the taxpayers' money on re-tasking the intelligence community for their own safety. QED. I welcome our future Bloomberg overlord....

But, seriously, all the most hawkish spy bosses had to do is show Obama any one month of surveillance showing every credible threat to his family's safety, and he'd build the fucking drones himself. Unless he had the serenity (and, non-violent training) of a Dr. King, his anger, as we've seen, would be channeled through the military intelligence complex.

Every puerile, racist commentator wondered, "where's Obama's anger? Aren't black men angry, with all the discrimination they face?" Don't you think we're seeing it, now? Gosh, I'd trade him ending each (rare) press conference with the black power salute, rather than this distributed and truly fascist hatred toward every potential threat. Since he can't be free, all must be oppressed; as his hair turns gray, all oldsters must die first.

We could pretend Bush was stupid (which didn't matter, since his advisers weren't), but we can't explain away this contempt through anything else but intentional disgust for Americans.

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